Innovative Digital Practices and Globalization in Higher Education. Advances in Higher Education and Professional Development (AHEPD) Book Series

We are moving toward a future in which digital practices are becoming more ubiquitous. Also, there is evidence to suggest that innovative digital practices are changing the face of 21st-century learning environments. Critical to 21st-century teaching and learning success is continued emphasis on learner preferences, shaped by innovative digital technology-driven learning environments alongside teacher awareness, knowledge, and preparedness to deliver high-impact instruction using active learning pedagogies. Thus, the purposeful and selective use of digital learning tools in higher education and the incorporation of appropriate active learning pedagogies are pivotal to enhancing and supporting meaningful student learning. "Innovative Digital Practices and Globalization in Higher Education" explores innovative digital practices to enhance academic performance for digital learners and prepare qualified graduates who are competent to work in an increasingly global digital workplace. Global competence has become an essential part of higher education and professional development. As such, it is the responsibility of higher education institutions to prepare students with the knowledge, skills, and competencies required to compete in the digital and global market. Covering topics such as design thinking, international students, and digital teaching innovation, this premier reference source is an essential resource for pre-service and in-service teachers, educational technologists, instructional designers, faculty, administrators, librarians, researchers, and academicians.

TechnologyWe Can't Live Without! (COVID-19 edition)

This panel is the evolution of a Technology that Educators of Computing Hail (TECH) Birds of a Feather session held at SIGCSE for seven years, grew into popular panels for many years [2-4, 6, 7], and served as a springboard for a regular column in ACM Inroads [1, 5, 9]. It will provide a chance for seasoned middle school, high school, and university educators to showcase the technologies they can't live without, what problems they solve, and how to use them. This year, we asked our panelists to highlight any technology in particular that helped them survive (and possibly even thrive!) during their remote teaching.

Experiences with Online Education During COVID-19

Early in spring 2020, universities world-wide suddenly moved their courses online in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. A number of researchers have studied the impact of this sudden move on the mental health and education of the effected students. The Center for Collegiate Mental Health reported that a third of students visited a college counseling center in 2020 due to mental health issues from the pandemic. Sixty eight percent of those seeking services for any reason indicated that the pandemic hurt their "motivation and focus." Sixty six percent indicated that the pandemic had a negative impact on academics. In a follow-up study, the Center found a significant increase in "academic distress" from 2019 to 2020. However, not all researchers found a negative impact. A study of at-risk undergraduates found that moving courses online did not necessarily demotivate disadvantaged students. This paper provides another view of the impact of moving courses online. The test performance of five semesters of a Computer Systems course is examined;in two of those semesters the course was offered online due to the pandemic. In addition, students in one online section were surveyed to determine what aspects, if any, of the online course should be retained after the course resumed face-to-face. Our study found that a larger percentage of the students in the online sections failed the tests and an analysis of test results confirms, with a 90% confidence, that overall online learners score at least 5 points lower on tests. In addition, in a survey of students in one online section, students reported that they felt their grades would have been higher had the course been face-to-face. However, most students reported that lab sessions, but not class sessions, should continue to be offered online.

Finding and Categorizing COVID-19 Papers in CS Education

In the first 2 years following the outbreak of COVID-19, many papers have been published regarding the impacts and adaptations of the pandemic on computer science education. As a first step towards a systematic literature mapping, this study attempts to develop a process for searching and a categorization schema for papers. The goal of this project is to produce a literature map which will be used to provide an initial assessment of the state of research, as well as a framework for future research directions. Limiting our search to papers published in the ACM Digital Library in the publications sponsored by SIGCSE, we first create and validate a query and inclusion/exclusion criteria for papers. Using a double evaluator model, we find high agreement with a Cohen's Kappa of 0.93, resulting in 42 papers across 6 conference proceedings. We further validate these findings by independent checking against all papers from SIGCSE2021 TS. We then develop categories across three dimensions: In activity: we find remote teaching, remote assessment, remote work, virtual events and general impact of pandemic. In measurement: we find grades, non-grade assessment, attendance/retention, affect/perception, and mental health. In population: we find K-12 students, university/college students, Educators, and the sub-categories of introductory/CS0/CS1 students, gender, and race. Double rater assessments initially produced a relatively low Kappa score of 0.58, but after protocol revision, and the production of additional categories, the kappa score was raised to a very high 0.94. © 2022 Owner/Author.

Collaborative Working Spheres for Global Software Development Education during the COVID-19 pandemic: An International Experience

This paper presents our experience implementing Collaborative Working Spheres (CWS) in the context of an international undergraduate course on Global Software Development (GSD) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many universities around the world increased their efforts in creating educational alternatives for adequately addressing the educational challenges that this pandemic has introduced. A particular case is the training of software skilled graduates to work in globally distributed environments because learning this topic requires a lot of practical work when student motivation could have been negatively affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, providing highly practical GSD courses during a pandemic is a challenging task for many of these universities. It is against this backdrop that we have developed an educational tool to provide CWS, enabling undergraduate students to acquire practical experience in GSD and improve their communication and teamworking skills, even during the COVID-19 pandemic. An international empirical evaluation was conducted involving students and teachers from seven universities in different countries around the world. The obtained results showed that our approach can make a significant contribution to the development of practical projects on undergraduate GSD courses with students developing their knowledge and social skills associated with this topic. The data collected on the teachers’perceptions suggested that our approach could also be useful in introducing the GSD approach at undergraduate level when social distancing is in place. Author

Experience Report on Using WeBWorK in Teaching Discrete Mathematics

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, most university classes were moved to online instruction. This greatly stimulated the need for online learning tools. WeBWorK is an open source online homework system, which has been used extensively in a variety of subjects. However, it has not been widely adopted by the Computer Science education community. In this paper, we discuss our experience using WeBWorK in teaching two large online sections of discrete mathematics. Emphasis is given to how we created randomized and auto-graded problems for many topics. In addition, we summarize student performance and feedback. We conclude with our reflections on using WeBWorK and propose future work for exploring its adaptive learning features. © 2023 ACM.

Design, Development, and Implementation of Software Engineering Virtual Laboratory: A Boon to Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Education During Covid-19 Pandemic

One of the critical features of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) education is learning by doing. The rapid upsurge in the use of Internet has drawn attention to the importance of online laboratory-based learning in CSE education. However, bringing such experiences online is challenging. Contextually, enabling online virtual lab-based learning is a modern trend in many educational institutions in India. So, online laboratory-based learning has emerged as a popular area of research among educational-technology researchers. In an online laboratory learning environment, the instructor has a significantly reduced role, and students take increased responsibility for their learning. This shows that in online lab-based learning, the involvement of students is higher. Traditional classroom-based laboratory learning has many limitations. The necessity to engage students in self-learning through online laboratory learning is imminent, as the students get an opportunity to perform their laboratory experiments beyond the classrooms as well, such as at home or when on vacation. In this paper we present the design, architecture, database schema, related technologies, user activities, and the use/reuse aspects of the software engineering virtual laboratory (SE VLab) that we have designed and developed. We also provide the details of each experiment in the SE VLab with examples and the assessment results obtained using the SE VLab. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Data Science Meets Science Teaching

The use of large, open-source data sets is ubiquitous in scientific research. Scientists--ranging from meteorologists to chemists to epidemiologists--are researching and investigating critical questions using data that they have not themselves collected. To contribute to the growing effort to bring data science into classrooms, the authors have been implementing the NSF-funded "Data Clubs" project to examine using data sets on topics such as ticks and Lyme disease, COVID-19, and sports and leisure injuries. Much of this work takes place with youth in out-of-school settings. In addition to developing modules for youth, the authors worked with a group of 18 high school science and computer science teachers from Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts who participated in a virtual 15-hour workshop series on data science education over the summer of 2020. The goal of the workshop was to introduce teachers to real and complex data sets, models for scaffolding learning, and tools for working with those data sets. In this article the authors share some of the key findings from this effort.

Studies on Education, Science, and Technology 2021

Education, science, and technology disciplines at all levels have never been more important, more exciting, or more crucial for its broader impacts on human society. The need for advanced technical skills is increasingly pressing to address climate change, combat COVID and other diseases, enhance the infrastructural built environment, grow food sources to feed an expanding planetary population, make new scientific discoveries, and interface synergistically with the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Teachers/instructors/mentors/professors need to be proficient in the best ways to convey knowledge and motivate the next generations of productive and engaged citizens of an increasingly diverse planet on which its human inhabitants must learn to confront and surmount increasingly difficult challenges to survival and prosperity. Students need to be focused on honing their learning skills and adapting to an ever-evolving global economy demanding always higher levels of technical proficiency. Students also need to be free to pursue any and all areas of interest without interference from cultural, political, ideological, or faith-imposed limitations. Policymakers need to provide the financial and human resources to fuel the engine of education, and they must create the maximum possible latitude for both those who teach and those who learn to pursue science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to their limits. This book contributes to addressing these needs and to suggesting potential solutions from multiple global perspectives. Adaptability of instructional methods, relevance of instructional content to students' lived experiences, and sensitivity to the mental and physical demands imposed on students must be hallmarks of education. The book is divided into three sections related to studies on education, science, and technology. Each section includes three chapters. The chapter's contributors are from the following countries: the United States, Germany, Greece, Indonesia, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Malaysia. This diversity brings an international perspective to the book.

Qualifications of Public School Mathematics and Computer Science Teachers in 2017-18. Data Point. NCES 2022-026

This Data Point examines the education and certification qualifications of public school mathematics and computer science teachers in the United States before COVID-19. It uses data from the public school teacher data file of the 2017-18 National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS). This is a national sample survey of public and private K-12 schools, principals, and teachers in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. State-level estimates can also be produced for public schools, principals, and teachers.

Importance of Time Management Skills during the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Exploratory Learning Analytics Study in an Introductory Programming Course

Time management is an important self-regulation strategy that can improve student learning and lead to higher performance. Students who can manage their time effectively are more likely to exhibit consistent engagement in learning activities and to complete course assignments in a timely manner. Well planning of the study time is an essential part of online learning and has been particularly critical in remote education during the COVID-19 pandemic. During this period of crisis, programming courses have been exceptionally challenging since students needed to devote sufficient time in the practice of code-writing besides studying the theoretical foundations, while, at the same time, working on the learning tasks for other online courses. Therefore, students' time management skills have been a determining factor in how they engaged in programming courses during the emergency remote education. In this regard, this study explores the association between students' time management skills and their course engagement (extracted from the LMS log data) in an undergraduate-level programming course taught fully online during the pandemic. Results show varying levels of participation and different temporal patterns of engagement depending on the students' ability to manage their time. Additionally, students with strong time management skills performed slightly better than those with poor time management skills. Implications for future research and practice are shared.

The World Is Our Classroom: Developing a Model for International Virtual Internships - The Global Innovations Project

In the aftermath of COVID-19, remote working has become the norm, and graduates now need an even wider range of skills, which traditional classrooms and internships do not always provide. Working in multiple time zones, within global multi-cultural teams, and only ever meeting colleagues through online technology are just some of the challenges, which require a new type of global graduate. Transversal skills including leadership, collaboration, innovation, digital, green, organization and communication skills are critical. The disruption from COVID-19 also presents unprecedented opportunities to develop more inclusive approaches to internships and international experiences, to level the playing field for students with special needs, from underrepresented groups or with caring commitments. In this position paper, we present a new Global Innovation internship model that has the aim of allowing students to complete technology internships and projects by working together virtually on real world challenges, guided by experienced industry and academic mentors. The model is being developed as part of an Erasmus+ funded project, and the partnership includes seven Higher Education Institutions from six different countries around the world. This position paper describes the design and development of a pilot programme of the Global Innovations internship model. Copyright © 2022 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved.

Reflections on a Global Pandemic: Capturing the Impact of COVID-19 on the UK Computer Science Education Community

From March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic imposed "emergency remote teaching"across education globally, leading to the closure of institutions across all settings. The resulting shift to online learning, teaching and assessment (LT&A) has placed significant challenges on practitioners - both professionally and logistically, as well as more personally, especially on their health and wellbeing. Building on a wider corpus of work, specifically focusing on computer science (CS) education in the UK, this poster presents the high-level outcomes of five major empirical studies conducted over the past two years with many thousands of practitioners. We highlight widespread disciplinary concerns relating to transitioning to online working and a return to face-to-face;potential future trends for LT deprioritisation of research;and wider impact on marginalised communities within CS. These collected results offer valuable insight into the longer-term impact of COVID-19 on UK CS practitioners, especially as we start to emerge from "pandemia", into a new post-COVID (ab)normal. © 2022 Owner/Author.

Comparing Access and Participation Outcomes of Schools Engaged in a Multi-school CS and Cybersecurity Intervention (Evaluation)

In early 2020, a cohort of 30 high schools engaged in a year-long intervention designed to increase their ability to offer Computer Science (CS) and Cybersecurity education to their students. After we performed an evaluation on the intervention's impacts, we turned our attention to whether or not the outcomes were influenced by engagement of the schools in the cohort. In this research paper, we focus on the guiding research question: How do schools' engagement in an intervention designed to build equitable CS and Cybersecurity education capacity impact schools' course offerings and students' participation in these courses? To measure equitable impact, we evaluated changes to actual CS and Cybersecurity course offerings and enrollment at the schools. We focused on the differences in participation across student gender and race/ethnicity as well as participation levels at the different schools across three years prior to the intervention and one year after the intervention. Findings indicate that, despite the disruption to schools from the COVID-19 pandemic, schools engaged in the program had very significant increases in AP CSP, AP CS A, and Cybersecurity course offerings and enrollment, particularly at schools that serve students from low-income families. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.

Practitioner Perspectives of the Impact of COVID-19 on CS Education in High Schools Serving Historically Marginalized Students (Fundamental)

Practitioners delivering computer science (CS) education during the COVID-19 pandemic have faced numerous challenges, including the move to online learning. Understanding the impact on students, particularly students from historically marginalized groups within the United States, requires deeper exploration. Our research question for this study was: In what ways has the high school computer science educational ecosystem for students been impacted by COVID-19, particularly when comparing schools that have student populations with a majority of historically underrepresented students to those that do not? To answer this question, we used the CAPE theoretical framework to measure schools' Capacity to offer CS, student Access to CS education, student Participation in CS, and Experiences of students taking CS [1]. We developed a quantitative instrument based on the results of a qualitative inquiry, then used the instrument to collect data from CS high school practitioners located in the United States (n=185) and performed a comparative analysis of the results. We found that the numbers of students participating in AP CS A courses, CS related as well as non-CS related extracurricular activities, and multiple extracurricular activities increased. However, schools primarily serving historically underrepresented students had significantly fewer students taking additional CS courses and fewer students participating in CS related extracurricular activities. Student learning in CS courses decreased significantly;however, engagement did not suffer. Other noncognitive factors, like students' understanding of the relevance of technology and confidence using technology, improved overall;however, student interested in taking additional CS courses was significantly lower in schools primarily serving historically underrepresented students. Last, the numbers of students taking the AP CS A and AP CS Principles exams declined overall. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.

COVID-19 and the New Normal in Engineering and Computer Science Education: Students' Perspectives on Online and Hybrid Education

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a major disruption to colleges and universities, with many institutions cancelling in-person learning and moving to completely online instruction for a time. Since the pandemic began, institutions of higher education have utilized varying degrees of face-to-face, hybrid and online instruction. These changes have impacted both students and faculty in science and engineering fields. Traditional science and engineering students have had to adapt quickly to new, and largely unwelcome, means of learning. In addition, faculty have had to abruptly alter their teaching to adjust to changes in teaching formats imposed by the pandemic. Using a web-based survey of engineering and computer science programs in US and Canadian universities, this paper studies the challenges introduced to STEM education due to the COVID-19 pandemic from students' perspectives. The survey was administered in face-to-face, hybrid and completely online classes to study students' perceptions and attitudes as well as challenges related to changes in teaching formats during the pandemic. Furthermore, this study assesses students' perceptions about the future of teaching in a post COVID-19 environment. Results of this study provide insights into both current and future impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on engineering and computer science education. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.

Multidisciplinary Engagement of Diverse Students in Computer Science Education through Research Focused on Social Media COVID-19 Misinformation

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted vital elements of personal and public health, society, and education. Increasingly with the viral pandemic, misinformation on health and science issues has been disseminated online. We developed an undergraduate training program focused on producing and presenting research to combat the rampant spread of this misinformation. Online misinformation represents a complex, multidisciplinary problem. Consequently, recruitment of students to the program was not exclusive to those from Computer Science or Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) educational backgrounds. Participants were actively recruited from fields such as Linguistics, Social and Political sciences. This data analytics outreach program aimed to train educationally and demographically diverse undergraduate students in computational techniques and presentation skills through guided research regarding the current burst of misinformation. Over ten weeks, participants were instructed in an online curriculum covering five milestones: Python programming, data processing, machine learning with natural language processing, visualization, and presentation. Subsequently, participants were engaged in Computer Science research analyzing a real-world data set gathered from Twitter™ 1 between January and June 2020. Participants were organized into teams to investigate subtopics within the broader subject of misinformation: 1) detecting social media bot accounts, 2) identifying propaganda with computational methods, and 3) studying the discourse surrounding science preprints (i.e., papers that have been posted to the Internet but have not been peer reviewed). The program culminated in an exposition where each team presented research results to program officers, senior faculty, deans, government officials, and industry experts. Here we present the program curriculum, metrics of educational effectiveness, and feedback collected from participants. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.

Surfacing Inequities and Their Broader Implications in the CS Education Research Community

Problem. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) need to be embedded throughout the computer science education (CSEd) research community in order to achieve empirically-based strategies in CSEd that is responsive to the needs of all of its constituents. However, there are no comprehensive studies that investigate what the barriers and challenges to DEI are among CSEd researchers. Research Question. When considering DEI among the CSEd research community, what barriers and challenges do different CSEd researchers face when conducting research? Method. We conducted a systematic literature review, developed a survey from the literature, and analyzed the quantitative and qualitative data from participants (n=72). Findings. Beyond finding that over half of the participants reported the COVID-19 pandemic as a barrier to engaging in research, participants reported that working more than an average 40-hour work week each year was a challenge. The lack of computing education being recognized as a subdiscipline within CS departments also was a barrier. Participants also reported that a lack of 1) awareness and adoption of practices from other education research fields and 2) general educational research theory were significant challenges for the CSEd research field. With respect to DEI, participants noted that lack of diversity among CSEd research partners/collaborators, among CSEd researchers in the community and among CSEd research community leadership are challenges for the community. Implications. Employing cultural competence is integral to CSEd research as we, as a community, inherently navigate differences in identities among researchers, and between researchers, practitioners, and participants in the currently unrepresentative and inequitable state of our field. As we grow our attitude, awareness, knowledge, and skill in cultural competence, we produce better-equipped allies, and greater resilience and belonging among community members from historically marginalized groups. We urge the community and relevant stakeholders to understand how to remove the barriers and challenges identified in our study. © 2022 ACM.

Experiences with online education during COVID-19

Early in spring 2020, universities world-wide suddenly moved their courses online in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. A number of researchers have studied the impact of this sudden move on the mental health and education of the effected students. The Center for Collegiate Mental Health reported that a third of students visited a college counseling center in 2020 due to mental health issues from the pandemic. Sixty eight percent of those seeking services for any reason indicated that the pandemic hurt their "motivation and focus."Sixty six percent indicated that the pandemic had a negative impact on academics. In a follow-up study, the Center found a significant increase in "academic distress"from 2019 to 2020. However, not all researchers found a negative impact. A study of at-risk undergraduates found that moving courses online did not necessarily demotivate disadvantaged students. This paper provides another view of the impact of moving courses online. The test performance of five semesters of a Computer Systems course is examined;in two of those semesters the course was offered online due to the pandemic. In addition, students in one online section were surveyed to determine what aspects, if any, of the online course should be retained after the course resumed face-To-face. Our study found that a larger percentage of the students in the online sections failed the tests and an analysis of test results confirms, with a 90% confidence, that overall online learners score at least 5 points lower on tests. In addition, in a survey of students in one online section, students reported that they felt their grades would have been higher had the course been face-To-face. However, most students reported that lab sessions, but not class sessions, should continue to be offered online. © 2022 ACM.

A Virtual Professional Development Program for Computer Science Education During COVID-19.

The need to expand computer science learning for all students has led to an increase in professional development (PD) opportunities for teachers. The Covid-19 pandemic, however, necessitated changes in well-established PD programs and a shift to virtual delivery. In this work, we describe our transition to a virtual PD institute, including the topics and design principles guiding the institute. We also examine how participation in the virtual PD institute influenced teacher outcomes. Data were collected from two cohorts of teachers. Data sources included surveys (N=30), lesson plans (N=22), and interviews (N=17) from a purposeful sample of participants. Findings gleaned from quantitative and qualitative analysis suggest an increase in teachers' knowledge and self-efficacy while highlighting the affordances of virtual PD most valued by teachers. Findings have implications for research and practice.